Democrat Jimmy Carter was the 39th president of the United States. / Prakash Mathema, AFP/Getty Images file

by Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY

by Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY

NEW YORK â?? An award for conflict resolution has created a conflict of its own as former President Jimmy Carter, a persistent critic of Israel, was honored Wednesday by students at a Jewish university.

The event at Cardozo Law School, part of Yeshiva University, has drawn a harsh response from alumni, who called on graduates to withhold donations to the school.

Carter received the International Advocate for Peace award from the student-run Journal of Conflict Resolution. The journal cited Carter's brokering of the 1979 peace accord between Israel and Egypt and the SALT II nuclear weapons treaty with the then-Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

But Carter's criticism of Israel for allowing Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and his meetings with the Palestinian group Hamas, have angered supporters of Israel â?? as did his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Last year, Carter said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not committed to a two-state solution for the Palestinian conflict, contrary to Netanyahu's official position.

"Jimmy Carter has an ignominious history of anti-Israel bigotry,'' a group called the Coalition of Concerned Cardozo Alumni posted on a website created to protest the event.

Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz offered to debate Carter on his human rights record. "He's never met a terrorist he didn't love, and never met an Israeli whom he did," Dershowitz told The Jewish Press.

The university on Wednesday barred media from the event, though it previously had solicited coverage.

Maria Chickedantz, 32, a Cardozo alumna now working as a labor lawyer, came to support Carter's appearance. "Not all Cardozo alumni support bullying of public figures for making a critique of Israeli policies. We don't equate that with an attack on Judaism or on the existence of the state of Israel."

Yeshiva's president, Richard Joel, and the university's board of overseers, said in statements that they object to Carter's views on Israel, but that the university is a "free marketplace of ideas,'' as Joel put it, and the students had the right to invite the former president.

Gary Emmanuel, a securities lawyer who organized the alumni opposition, called Carter's appearance at a Jewish school "unconscionable'' and "a slap in the face'' to alumni. Citing academic freedom as a rationale for continuing with the event is "disingenuous,'' Emmanuel said.

If students invited former Klan member David Duke, he said, "You can be sure they would say, 'Absolutely not.' There is a red line somewhere and it's a matter of where you draw it. That's where the disagreement lies.''